Some small, reflexive impatience in me longed to dismiss Action Bronson's existence the second I heard his sales pitch: white guy from Queens, sounds exactly like Ghostface Killah, raps over soul loops and has a thing for extravagant food metaphors because he's also a chef. I mean, come on. It felt so on-the-nose it hardly needed to exist, like an abandoned Adult Swim pilot in rapper form. Hadn't we all proved to each other that we loved Ghostface enough already? Did we all need to come in for that group hug again? There's a lot of love in that corner, but hoo boy, was it ever growing musty.
But Bronson, as he tends to do, dismantled my defenses. He's that kind of guy; watching YouTube clips of him, say, searing a slab of ahi tuna in an oversized orange Polo shirt is to be mowed over by an irresistible charm offensive. It helps that he's an undeniably talented rapper. He might be sampling Ghostface's voice, but lately Ghostface has been using it wrong, and to hear someone pick up Ghost's manic energy where he left it (arguably, somewhere around Fishscale) is like watching an eager creative team breathe new life into a beloved but weary old franchise.
Well-Done, Bronson's followup to his breakthrough, Dr. Lecter, pairs him with producer Statik Selektah, who is something of a spiritual brother-in-arms: Together, they could probably stage a Civil-War-style reenactment of the "Ice Cream" video. Selektah gives Bronson 15 functionally bumping, minimally tweaked DJ Premier/Pete Rock updates: horn stabs, clipped drums, scratched vocal samples, lots of empty space to fill. Bronson barrels his big-shouldered way through it all, and, like Dr. Lecter, the end result is about as reliably pleasurable as a good slice.
Bronson's biggest strengths are a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of self-regard: At its best, Well-Done is like spending 45 minutes with the affable, roly-poly guy who cracked you up at your high school lunch table. "See my silhouette, right behind me bitches pirouette/ That's a dance move, it's origin is French," he informs us on "White Silk". He cracks winningly on his weight: "Underneath a lot of blubber, lot of six pack." ("Cocoa Butter"). Say what you will about his originality, but he's unquestionably an innovator in the field of nonsensical Obama namedrops: "Obama copped me the sandwich!" he bellows at one point, "Obama EBT, I'm a G" at another.
And his gusto with food metaphors rivals Ghost at his "my stomach growlin!" best: his lungs, when he smokes weed, are "smoky like the pork shoulder." Instead of crushing up flakes of blow, he raps about "crushing fennel pollen," and his blunt-force conviction renders it as magnetically cool-sounding an activity as coke-kingpin razor-shaving for precisely that millisecond. None of this enacts some magical crowbar separation between him and Ghostface, of course, a separation he's starting to show signs of desiring: He has protested weakly in interviews that his style is actually a cross between Cam'ron and Kool G Rap, which is kind of like Shyne insisting he never really listened to Biggie. But Bronson shouldn't sweat the comparisons, or worse, try to fend them off: Fondly reminding people of one of the greatest rappers ever is hardly a curse.
